Eversheds International
Global home
Food
- Introduction
- Areas of expertise:
- Food labelling, advertising and sales
- Food composition
- European food regulation
- Product liability and product recalls
- Environment and packaging
- Health and safety
- Competition
- Defending prosecutions
- Corporate finance
- Commercial contracts
- Commercial disputes
- Liability claims management
- Human resources
- Tax
- Franchising
- Brand and other IP protection
Competition
We now have one of the toughest competition regimes in the world, and regulatory bodies maintain a close watch on both cartel and merger activity. The food sector has been the subject of numerous market investigations over the years and food producers have themselves been the victims of cartels in relation to certain ingredients such as vitamins and sorbates.
Mergers in the sector continue apace, as ingredient suppliers and food producers feel the squeeze of lower shelf prices and higher commodity prices on their margins, and seek savings from consolidation of their operations.
The key issues for companies in the sector are therefore maintaining compliance with competition law, ensuring appropriate representation to the competition authorities in the context of mergers (either their own mergers or third party mergers) and maintaining the ability to use competition law where they fall victim to anti-competitive activity.
We have advised on a number of EU sectoral investigations and over half of the market investigations conducted by the UK Competition Commission over the past five years, developing strategic plans for handling the inquiries and making sure our clients are familiar with the issues, the way the regulators think and the procedures they adopt so that there are no surprises.
We clear the path with the competition authorities for corporate transactions, steering clients through competition investigations and help ensure that supply and pricing policies and distribution strategies are competition law compliant.
Our practice differs from that of many of our competitors. Whilst we continue to handle the most difficult of M&A cases (whether at ECMR or national level), we principally advise on contentious and non-contentious behavioural and investigatory work. We have an ongoing caseload which, at any one time, is likely to involve advising on complaints to the European Commission or the OFT/sector regulators, defending companies who are being investigated for alleged abuse of dominance or cartel activity (in the latter context criminal as well as civil activity) and representing companies in EU sectoral enquiries and UK market investigations.
However, it is not all about dealing with major investigations. We relish the opportunity to work closely with our clients behind the scenes to ensure that their supply and pricing policies, distribution strategies and commercial agreements meet the requirements of competition law, and we have an innovative approach to competition compliance. For example, we developed the award winning Eversheds Competition Law Online Toolkit (which incorporates automatic attendance recording) to compliment other compliance training methods.
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